Tuesday, February 12, 2008

New on DVD: Gone Baby Gone, No Reservations and Romance & Cigarettes

By John P. Meyer

Featured film titles releasing for the small screen this week include a tense police drama, a light-hearted chef-centric orphan tale and a very adult musical comedy.

Amy Ryan's character seems to enjoy drinking beer while talking to the cops. Nice work if you can get it.

First up is the second movie of 2007 to feature the suddenly quite impressive acting talents of Casey Affleck. (Yes, you heard me right.) In Gone Baby Gone, Casey plays the lead role of Patrick Kenzie, a Boston-based private eye who has a kidnapping case more or less dumped into his lap; he and his assistant (Michelle Monaghan) find themselves employed to investigate the whereabouts of a missing kid at the same time that the Boston PD are actively pursuing the matter, leading to the expected friction and some unexpected consequences. For some unbeknownst reason, bit player Amy Ryan (as the missing kid's mom) finds herself up for all sorts of awards (including the Oscar) as Best Supporting Actress.

Next up is No Reservations, which opened so closely on the heels (paw pads?) of Ratatouille that we started to wonder whether 2007 would be the year of the back-of-house foodie film. Starring the oscar-nominated Abigail Breslin as a car-accident orphan forced to move in with her career-driven aunt (played by Michael Douglas' main squeeze, Catherine Zeta-Jones), it shaped up to be a saccharine-sweet, tear-jerking romantic comedy. This ends up being the case, with the proviso that it's a quite well-done one. Bon appetite.

Ms. Winslet's vices in the film are not limited to smoking - although she (along with the rest of the players) certainly does a lot of it.

Finally, let's talk about Romance & Cigarettes, a John Turturro written/directed production that's all singing, all dancing, as the well-heeled producers of big movie musicals used to boast. The big draws for me going into this thing were the presence of Chris Walken soft-shoeing it down the streets of New York and Kate Winslet in the role of a foul-mouthed lingerie store owner who two-times Susan Sarandon for the attentions of James Gandolfini. I was not disappointed, and neither will you be - but you might want to save the movie-watching experience until the kids are fast asleep and out of earshot.

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